Okay, okay, I’m a beer snob. I’m German, so what do you expect? It wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago that I thought American beers were crap and the best thing in the world were German beers brewed according to the Reinheitsgebot that was established 1516. I’d always believed that this related to quality, but, guess what: it had more to do with taxation than anything else. What opened my eyes? This article by Burkhard Bilger, published in the New Yorker around Thanksgiving this year, on the Dogfish Head Brewery in New England. Here’s a snip:
Calagione was used to odd suggestions from customers. On Monday mornings, his brewery’s answering machine is sometimes full of rambling meditations from fans, in the grips of beery enlightenment at their local bar. But Gasparine’s idea was different. It spoke to Calagione’s own contradictory ambitions for Dogfish: to make beers so potent and unique that they couldn’t be judged by ordinary standards, and to win for them the prestige and premium prices usually reserved for fine wine. And so, a year later, Calagione sent Gasparine back to Paraguay with an order for forty-four hundred board feet of palo santo. “I told him to get a shitload,” he remembers. “We were going to build the biggest wooden barrel since the days of Prohibition.
This is a great article. And now excuse me while I’m browsing American beers.
Filed under: Crafts and Modification, Feed Me Food, Grumpy German , History, beer, German beer, American beer
